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A company website is your chance to show online clients and customers what you are all about. They will use your website as a tool to find out more about you and maybe even to buy your products. The first thing they will usually see if the homepage so it has to be right and it has to be able to draw people in. Make sure your homepage has everything they need in order to find the parts of your website they want to get to.

A homepage needs to be simple yet striking. Make sure it is clear and concise as too much information will be confusing for your customers. Use some slogans and simple taglines to get people interested. There also needs to be good navigation, as people will be using your site to get the products and services they want to see. Make it easy and accessible.

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, should be a central part of your web marketing strategy. This is because it really can help you to achieve sales within your business and it will have massive implications for you. If you want to try your hand at SEO, there are a few ways you can learn.

• Take a course. You will learn all of the basics and will be able to take your new knowledge away and apply it to your business.
• Teach yourself on the internet. This might be quite time-consuming but there are some great resources out there.
• Learn from somebody else. If you can find someone willing to teach you, take full advantage of it. Much of SEO is about the personal experience so if someone can tutor you one-to-one this will be really helpful.
• Get a job with a web marketing agency. If you are serious about SEO, the only way to learn it properly is to live and breathe it!

The internet is saturated with websites as more and more businesses aim to build an online presence for themselves. It’s an important part of your marketing strategy and it has to be executed properly if you want to succeed. Luckily, there are many things you can do if you want your business to stand out online.

First of all, make sure you have a highly professional website that is an accurate representation of your business. It’s so important that people get the right first impression – if they don’t like what they see, it is all too easy for them to go elsewhere. Get a professionally-designed website that looks good and works well.

Next, it’s all about driving traffic to your site. If you want to be a serious player in your field, people need to know about you. Devise an online marketing strategy, try out some search engine optimisation and paid search techniques and build up your success slowly but surely.

Email marketing is one of the few online marketing channels that has stood the test of time. In fact, email is 25 years old this year, and it still trumps the top spot on many B2B marketer’s lists of B2B lead generation strategies. One of the biggest trends in email marketing at the moment, that has generated great results for many B2B businesses, is marketing automation.

Not sure what the fuss about marketing automation is? Marketing automation tools are effectively hybrid email marketing tools that connect with your CRM to enable you to automatically send highly targeted emails to leads that are personalised specifically to them.

When Thomson Reuters upgraded to a marketing automation solution, their revenue increased by 172%. Another company increased their revenue by 832% (going from $80,000 in debt to $2 million in revenue) in just three years. While traditional newsletters and email marketing are still important, the ability to capture more data on users and use behavioural-triggers has enabled B2B marketers to get a lot smarter with how they target users in the inbox.

SEO is becoming more complex by the day and the game is all about second-guessing Google.  The Mountain View based search giants are notoriously guarded about their algorithms – and it’s the job of digital marketing agencies and SEO teams to try and decipher the rules and regulations.  One thing we do know is that Social Media is becoming one of the most important factors in driving modern websites into 2016, 2017 and beyond.  As a testament to popularity, authority and reliability – the likes of Facebook and Twitter are responsible for some significant movement in the SERPs.

As a direct result of Google’s Penguin 2.0 update earlier this year, content has become the new Holy Grail in online marketing.  The strength in content and the method of identifying its value (and thus the value of the website behind the content) is through its popularity.  Shares, tweets, +1s, pins, likes – these are all the KPIs of content.  Social media simply can’t be ignored in marketing campaigns, SEO drives and brand engagement.

It’s well known that companies managing customer relationships the best are more likely to win than those that don’t. This is why adoption of modern CRM systems has skyrocketed in recent years, even amongst SMEs that often lack the resources to adopt enterprise-style technologies.

A well-implemented CRM system can replace manual processes that create significant organisational inefficiencies. But CRM systems don’t just create efficiency by reducing the use of inefficient processes. You also need to bear in mind that CRM systems give companies the ability to move away from tools, like spreadsheets, that appear to be entirely functional but fall short in a variety of areas.

For the majority of companies, data is one of the most valuable strategic assets, and CRM systems house some of the most valuable data. Of course, data in and of itself is often of limited practical use; its real value comes from data analysis and visualisation tools. CRM platforms typically offer a variety of homegrown and third-party tools that enable companies to understand their CRM data and learn things about their customers that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

Businesses are joining in online marketing to grab growing customers in a web. People are using online media in inquiring and purchasing products instead of going to stores. In fact, people are using the internet in getting information about goods or services before going for it. This is why it has become essential for companies to create a digital version of a brand to deliver information to the potential customers in the market. Further, leading marketing experts based in Northampton in the United Kingdom are predicting that internet marketing would dominate the market in future. It is essential for companies to create the special website and start promoting to survive in the future market. But, it is not easy to succeed in marketing due to stiff competition. Special strategies are essential for companies to promote and deliver success in marketing immediately. Marketing experts need to be hired to formulate special strategies to deliver success in marketing. Let us look at the important services requires by companies to achieve success in marketing immediately. (more…)

Social Media juggernauts, Facebook, have definitely not heard of the term “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it”, as they’re making even more changes to their already baffling algorithm! What does this mean for you? Well if you’re a user, you shouldn’t see too much of a difference to your personal page, but if you’re an advertiser, expect massive changes to the way you promote your posts.

Gone is the 20% rule for text on advert images which is, of course, a great thing, but the biggest issue will come with the changes to local advertising. It is said that there will be massive changes, and we have a feeling advertisers will not be happy.

Facebook is launching their “save button” for saving articles for reading later to allow websites all over the internet to allow saving, right on Facebook. This, in my not so humble opinion, effectively kills RSS, as a consumer blog and article consumption medium, once and for all.

It has been said for a while that RSS was dying (despite others arguing to the contrary), and warned bloggers and businesses that they should be finding other mediums, such as email, to replace that consumption format and ensure continued traffic and readership to their blogs. Sure enough, if you read Google trends, a natural interest in RSS fell by at least 50% back in 2013. People simply aren’t using RSS readers any more, and I’d argue if you even mention “RSS” people won’t even know what you’re talking about. RSS isn’t social. You can’t reply via RSS. You can’t share via RSS. Only social is social and Facebook just opened that (using “open” very loosely) to the entire web.